You Aren’t What You Eat

Why is everyone so obsessed with food? How did chefs come to be the gurus of the age? And what’s with serving chips in a beaker and slivers of vegetable on hot stones? This polemic against “foodies” and their oral fixation pits Jamie Oliver against Jacques Derrida, and sees the author eating a nitro-frozen bolus of olive oil, marvelling at food fashion, and descending into the ninth circle of foodist hell at MasterChef Live. It is available now in the UK & Eire, Australia, and North America.

‘His eye for the absurd and the hypocritical is sharper than a flashing Sabatier… writing about cooking doesn’t get tougher, or funnier, than this’ — Guardian

‘Scathingly funny and well-researched… belly laughs aplenty’ — Time Out

‘A bloody, brutal and necessary sacred cow hunt… Steven Poole shows about as much mercy as an abattoir shootist. Unlike such an operative, however, he is brilliantly and consistently and winningly funny: his is a great comic performance’ — Jonathan Meades, Observer

‘Poole is very entertaining as he mocks all manifestations of foodism … He’s never wrong … It is the decadence of this culture that makes him so wittily cross’ — Evening Standard

‘Rips into all aspects of foodie culture gleefully, eruditely and as far as i can see, irrefutably. If there’s any justice, it should put an immediate end to all those incomprehensible menus, absurd claims about the “art” of cooking, and to chips inexplicably served in beakers’ — Books of the Year, Spectator